Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Yuckster Fricassee

For two decades, Dan Patrick and Rick Reilly were two of the most successful wiseacres in sports. Reilly, the writer, sent up flares from his back-page column in Sports Illustrated. Patrick, the TV anchor, helped make ESPN’s “SportsCenter” into an institution so cheerfully subversive that it took 10 years and the combined efforts of dozens of anchors, producers and executives to remove its fangs. It was quite an occasion last October, then, when Patrick and Reilly announced they were swapping logos. Patrick left ESPN, his home of 18 years, and become a contributor to Sports Illustrated; Reilly, a 22-year vet of S.I., transferred to ESPN. “It wasn’t a trade!” Reilly clarified recently. “Me for him as a broadcaster is like bringing a giant truck of Velveeta to a French chef.”

The sporting press is full of free agents, but Patrick and Reilly are more intriguing than most. For one thing, ESPN will reportedly pay Reilly $17 million over five years, or roughly $50,000 per one-liner. For another, Patrick and Reilly will be taking their acts in front of their toughest crowd yet: the cheap seats of the Web.

You know — the legions of bloggers, blog commenters, message-board creatures and five-tool pranksters who lie like coiled snakes, waiting for name journalists to slip up. Those who are experts at sniffing out false sentiment, mailed-in columns, weak attempts at humor. Minutes after the Patrick-for-Reilly switch was announced, one of the merrymakers over at the Web site Deadspin quipped that ESPN had filled its “smart-alecky, middle-aged white guy quota.”

But the Web it will be. Patrick’s daily radio show is streamed live through Sports Illustrated’s fan-powered Web site FanNation, where bloggers can comment on the show in real time. Reilly can’t work for six months — a stipulation of his S.I. contract — but his column will start appearing in ESPN magazine and on ESPN.com after June 1. “It’s like a grown-up video game,” Patrick said of the interplay between media celebrity and Web denizen. “We’re playing Halo against one another.” Reilly said, “I realize this is a whole new culture I’m diving into.” Indeed, Internet sports journalism has not only created a highly critical fan base but enforced a bottom-up hierarchy. Interloping journalists who are merely on the Web, rather than of the Web, are treated like Red Sox fans crashing the box seats at Yankee Stadium. How will Patrick and Reilly fortify themselves for the journey into the digital frontier?

Patrick and Reilly make for unusual pilgrims. Patrick is a confessed relic of cable television’s bargain-basement infancy. He was a reporter for CNN during its “Chicken Noodle Network” days and joined ESPN in 1989, when that network was still filling airtime with Australian Rules Football. Hosting “SportsCenter” with Keith Olbermann, Patrick was encouraged to — or, he would say, was not forbidden to — riff, improvise, mint catchphrases. Dan and Keith pulled off what seems like a staggering intellectual achievement: they made a sports show that was also effectively a parody of a sports show. Next to Olbermann’s billowing smokestack, Patrick was a soothing presence with a camera-ready smile; he looked like a parody of a network sportscaster, which only increased the effect.

A few years ago, Patrick decided that the Big Show (as he and Olbermann dubbed it) had bloated into a different product altogether. Sly wit had been elbowed aside by game-show segments and rueful advertising gimmicks like the Budweiser Hot Seat. “I wasn’t having as much fun as I once did, and it probably stemmed from SportsCenter,” Patrick told me. After quitting ESPN in October, he signed a deal with the Chicago-based Content Factory to distribute his show on terrestrial and XM satellite radio and then, weeks later, agreed to a second deal with S.I. to stream the show through SI.com and contribute to the print magazine.

“The Dan Patrick Show” is a return to Patrick’s prankish, freewheeling past. It has no analog on sports radio, lacking both the tired vaudeville bits of “Mike & Mike in the Morning” and the locker-room swagger of “The Jim Rome Show.” A host in both senses of the word, Patrick likes to let the athletes do the talking. Kevin Garnett regaled Patrick’s audience via speakerphone, the intimacy of the proceedings causing him to lapse into profanity; a bleary Jim McMahon, the face of 1980s quarterbacking cool, answered Patrick’s phone call from his bed. Patrick can put on his newsman’s fedora, too: in December, he scored the first sit-down with Bud Selig after the release of the Mitchell Report. As Selig stammered through question after question, a fed-up Patrick finally wailed, “But you’re the commissioner!”

Photo

Credit
Peter Stemmler

Sports radio hosts have read listener e-mail for years, but Patrick’s show is the first to dive headfirst into the Web. Every week, Patrick conducts an athlete interview that appears in three forms: in print in the pages of S.I.; as an audio segment on “The Dan Patrick Show”; and, finally, as an archived sound file on the FanNation site, where it is entombed for those industrious types who can’t listen live. Moreover, Patrick told me, he has a vision of Web listeners determining the course of the broadcast. “I have an idea of saying something and seeing the reaction right away,” he said. If FanNation’s readers are responding more to a discussion of steroids than to the Summer Olympics, Patrick might drop the latter subject entirely. If a reader suggests that Patrick hammer an athlete, he may. David Bauer, S.I.’s deputy managing editor, says it’s akin to bringing a late-night talk show into the magazine — a collaborative effort that is written and rewritten on the fly.

From his perch in Los Angeles, Reilly looks upon the Internet with a more jaundiced eye. Reilly is a proud print throwback, a practitioner of what he calls “straight-up, old-school, Mike Royko sportswriting.” He studied at The Los Angeles Times under the jaunty columnist Jim Murray, and in his “Life of Reilly” column, which ran on the back page of Sports Illustrated for nine years, he showed some of Murray’s gift for gag lines and outrageous situations. (Reilly once heralded the opening of deer season by conducting a mock interview with the coach of the vanquished bucks: “We can’t keep losing at home like this.”) Later on, and to the regret of many of us cantankerous types, Reilly’s column turned in a decidedly heartwarming direction. He spanned the globe, searching for tales of sporting inspiration. In one recent column, he profiled a middle-school soccer goalie who committed suicide but whose donated organs helped save the life of a weekend jogger, who, in turn, met the father of the goalie. In another, he tracked down the man who played quarterback for the University of Hawaii at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Regardless of the reception these columns may have received, Reilly says they provided him with spiritual fulfillment and “got me out of myself.”

Reilly’s early voyages onto the Internet have been less than satisfying. As S.I.’s resident comedian, Reilly was the lab rat for some doomed experiments, as when he was rendered as a cartoon for a series of awful segments called the “Riffs of Reilly.” Perhaps owing to that acute trauma, Reilly insists that when he moves to ESPN.com, his column will remain exactly as it is. Same material, same voice and not a word longer. “Rick is a zealous advocate for the 800-word column,” says John Walsh, ESPN’s executive editor.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

This might sound a bit strange. The Web is supposed to allow the sportswriter to unbutton his blazer and slough off the constraints of the print trade. What looks like a small masterpiece on the back page of Sports Illustrated might seem somehow smaller on the Internet. But where some of us gaze at the Web and see a delightfully shaggy form of journalism, Reilly sees too many sloppy, overly indulgent meditations. “A lot of these guys could use a Lincoln Continental, if not a Greyhound bus, full of editors,” he told me. (When I asked about popular ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons — soon to be his teammate — Reilly pretended that the phone had gone dead.) Reilly will labor in a confined space and hope the reader notices the difference in craftsmanship. “I go through 10 ideas in a week,” Reilly said. “I have seven or eight different voices: angry guy, sentimental guy, crazy guy, burst a bubble, lift a little guy up, bring a big guy down. . . .”

It’s an open question as to whether “sentimental guy” and some of his sidekicks will work in the digital domain. If anything, they seem to go against the prevailing forces of snark. Reilly, of course, has written plenty of snarky sports columns, too — he memorably asked Sammy Sosa to take a drug test. But he’s counting on sports fans thinking that the new Reilly — the voice that can be sentimental and overly fond of corny one-liners — will be a must-read destination no matter how obscure the subject. As Reilly put it to me, “Why can’t there be a Mike Royko of the Web?”

It’s an interesting question. The best answer is that the Web has changed something about the essential nature of sports journalism. For the better part of a century, we sports fans lived in a media universe ruled by swaggering, outsize voices — from Royko to Reilly, from Howard Cosell to Dan and Keith.

But the stars of the new frontier, the Web, are not what we would recognize as general opiners so much as experts on particular niches: statistics, college recruiting, major-league farm systems and other forms of advanced sports studies. Think of ESPN.com’s John Hollinger, fantasy savants like Matthew Berry, gossip outposts like Deadspin and the Big Lead, recruiting gurus at Rivals.com. (A notable exception is Simmons, a general columnist with broad reach.)

This is what the broadsides launched against the Web community by various beechwood-aged newsmen have missed. The Web is not, at its heart, a place for nihilistic attitude-mongering but something that feels more like sports academia. In the face of all these bits of information, Patrick and Reilly, of course, are offering up what is essentially shtick. You can lead a sports fan to a smart-alecky, middle-aged white guy, but can you make him pay attention?

Bryan Curtis, a former editor at Slate, is Play’s media columnist.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Yuckster Fricassee. Today's Paper|Subscribe